Marketing Control Redux

As I have argued in earlier chapters, marketing is a discipline built upon the need for meta-control—it has sought to integrate under central control practices that are motivated by the desire to control production, distribution and consumption. Even in a definition that is focused around marketing as a service for facilitating the exchange of attention, control is implicit—marketing is helping to control the flow of attention, to make sure it is directed in the ways that strategically make the most sense. Similarly, rhetoric is concerned with control. The rhetor seeks to control the attention of the audience, control their regard, their understanding, and the behaviour that is born from understanding. Magic, too, is always motivated by the urge to control—the forces of nature, fate, luck, other people, or simply one’s own life.

However, control, it would appear, must always be acquired and exercised at a cost. If the rhetor achieves control of an audience, then she has achieved it by the audience surrendering their control. If the marketer achieves control of a target audience, then they achieve it at the cost of the audience’s control of their own need and desires (perhaps, of their own understandings). And if the magician seeks control over another human, then it would seem quite clear that this comes at the cost of the victim’s own ability to control their destiny. Exerting control over something is an attempt to take control of that thing away from something or someone else—and, in the case of exerting control over entities with their own agency, that will often mean that control is being taken away from that entity. Here we can remember Gorgias’ Encomium on Helen, where he states that “the speech which persuades the soul constrains that soul” (Dillon and Gergel, 2003, p. 81). It is this side of control, its violence, its theft of agency, which has made so many uneasy with it, so many suspicious of its presence and protesting at its force. Who likes to feel controlled, after all? Brehm’s theory of “psychological reactance” (Brehm and Sensenig, 1966; Brehm and Cole, 1966) gives the scientific stamp of approval to something that rhetors have known for millennia, namely, that audiences don’t like to feel like they are being forced into a choice. We want to believe that we have made choices from our own volition. Practices such as marketing, rhetoric, and magic are therefore bound to draw suspicion and raise hackles. Such reactions have been at the root of marketing scholarship’s increasing unease with persuasive communication. The relationship and service perspectives that have grown to encompass much of marketing theory since the early 1980s have had a very critical attitude towards traditional ‘manipulative’ marketing communication. Varey’s (2000) arguments are typical of this direction. He observes that the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy’s [1979] term for the way in which we tend to think of ‘sending’ our thoughts to others by using the conduit of language) is “thoroughly taken for granted by institutional structures and everyday thinking” and supports “the dominant group […] in accomplishing control over those they choose to subordinate” (Varey, 2000, p. 333). Management sees communication as a “conduit for the transmission or transportation of expressions of self-interest” (p. 336). Instead, Varey (2000) advises that management should adopt the “alternative participatory conception of communication” (ibid.) in which the organisation “does not inherently and covertly support the deployment of power over others”. A manager should therefore be seen as a “steward of a responsive and responsible productive community”. Theorists of the relationship and service marketing perspectives have constantly echoed Varey’s call for marketing communication to move from “controlling to stewardship” (p. 337). Duncan and Moriarty (1998), in their examination of communication in marketing relationships, seek to deemphasise the place of persuasion, which they gloss as “manipulative”, and instead argue for an “interactive communication” approach in marketing where “listening is given as much importance as saying” (p. 2). This focus on interaction, which has been a significant function of both a turn towards the relational in marketing as well as the availability of communication technologies that can facilitate it, has led to a valorisation of dialogue as the dominant marketing communication mode. For example, Vargo and Lusch (2004), in their foundational paper for the Service-Dominant logic, heavily cite Duncan and Moriarty (1998) and conclude that the “normative goal should not be communication to the market but developing ongoing communication processes, or dialogues, with micromarkets and ideally markets of one” (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, p. 14). Marketing promotion should be “characterized by dialogue, asking and answering questions” (p. 13) rather than persuasive monologues from the firm.

Marketing scholarship’s enthusiasm for promoting a move away from monological, persuasive forms of communication towards interactive, symmetrical dialogues with stakeholders is often framed as a simple reaction to the realities of the market. As Lindberg-Repo and Grönroos (2004) note, “service firms in the new environment can no longer create a competitive advantage by implementing only persuasive traditional marketing communication principles” (p. 238). In other words, customers and other stakeholders are no longer reacting well (or at all) to the “persuasive traditional” techniques and so we have to find another approach. Even so, the path to dialogue is clearly a thorny one. Marketers seem to have a hard time getting it right. Grönroos (2000) admits that “frequently relationship marketing fails because marketers rely on relationship-like, but nevertheless manipulative, one-way communication” (p. 6). Similarly, Varey (2008) has further cautioned that paying lip service to the idea of marketing dialogue is not enough—true interaction with stakeholders cannot be based upon “mutually reactive or directive dyadic monologues of reciprocal manipulation” (p. 81). Dialogue must be understood as the “path to communion and the ground for self-discovery” (p. 90). The general consensus, then, is that marketing should be moving towards “mutually creative co-constructed dialogue” (Ballantyne et al., 2011, p. 208) and eschewing ‘manipulative’ persuasion based on ‘traditional’ ‘one-way’ models.

This movement in marketing scholarship is important for a few reasons. Firstly, in the repeated references throughout this literature to ‘traditional’ marketing communication there is a rhetorical attempt to construct a quite simplistic understanding of marketing communication history. Secondly, that history is built around the identification of persuasion with manipulation and control. This means that scholars promoting relationship and service perspectives are able to frame themselves as enlightened (rational) saviours of commercial communication, advancing an oppositional reading of ‘traditional’ marketing communication, which places co-created meanings and dialogue in clear distinction to persuasion. This assumes that dialogue, co-created understandings, or the process of “reasoning together to build up a common meaning” (Grönroos, 2000, p. 10) are in some sense free of persuasion and rhetorical strategies. Perhaps this stance stems from the persistent Platonic/Aristotelian bureaucratic rhetoric tradition that influences even scholars who are not overly enmired in the ‘marketing science’ paradigm and which promotes the idea of a discourse which ‘benevolently’ controls through process and exclusion (of irrationality, emotion, magical thinking, etc.)—‘let’s all sit down and talk sensibly about this …’.

The attempt to frame management as stewardship rather than control is a rhetorical feint. Dialogue, listening, and two-way communication are not aspects of communication that are impervious to practice of persuasion—indeed, they are very much essential to it. Full and continuous appreciation of the audience will be a central concern for any rhetor—the means of persuasion grow from a consideration of what a particular audience at a particular time will respond to. This is something that is embedded in Aristotelian rhetoric just as much as it is in Sophistic approaches. Furthermore, rhetoric can occur over mass media, in front of a large live audience, in a back office, a classroom, or in a one-to-one dialogue. Listening does not prevent rhetoric, it enables it, makes it more powerful and more likely to succeed. Listening provides the rhetor with the information that they need to understand the assumptions, prejudices, desires, beliefs, moods, and reasonings of their interlocutors. Without such information, any attempt at persuasion is always going to be based upon assumed lowest common denominators and therefore highly likely to produce failure or suboptimal results.

Having said this, the motivation behind the service and relationship marketing focus on dialogue seems clear. It is manipulation that is the real target. Traditional marketing communication is characterised as manipulative and it is manipulation that we must move away from. ‘Tricking’ customers, manipulating them into buying things they don’t want for reasons that really don’t make sense is not something that marketing should be doing anymore (the assumption being that this was indeed the way that marketing communication functioned ‘traditionally’). The “traditional concept” of marketing communication is portrayed as something which is done to a “passive consumer” who is treated “as an object in the process” (Finne and Grönroos, 2009, p. 190), the target of a bag of “old and well tried tricks, upgraded by sophisticated scientific manipulation” (Gummesson, 2008, p. 326). In contrast, working with stakeholders to co-create shared meaning is depicted as power symmetrical and therefore non-manipulative—if we see the customer as an equal actor in the creation of shared meaning then it stands to reason that we would not be trying to persuade them of anything. Instead we would focus our marketing efforts on creating a “platform for communicative interaction” where “reciprocal value propositions” can be co-created to the mutual advantage of all stakeholders (Ballantyne et al., 2011, p. 208).

The opposition of dialogue and persuasion (control), is a false dichotomy, however. As we have seen in the literature on the presence of magical thinking in consumption experiences, stakeholders pursue consumption patterns which they feel might afford them control over their environment, their life, and their sense of identity—they adopt and adapt marketing communications, value propositions, cultural symbologies, tools and techniques to their own ends. Many of the discourse patterns that Muñiz and Schau (2005) find in Apple Newton communities, for example, are classic rhetorical attempts to persuade others that their choices are not as optimal as the choices that a Newton user has. Many of the dialogue or conversation forms that we are involved with day-to-day, whether as consumers, workers, stakeholders, friends, or family, are persuasive in their broad motivation, or at least have persuasion as a significant component. It, therefore, makes little sense to demonise persuasion in the hope that marketing can provide a platform for the sort of power-symmetrical, explorative, enriching dialogue which, when listening, does not try to “oppose or assimilate” (Pearce and Pearce, 2004, p. 45) but instead seeks to remain “in the tension between standing your own ground and being profoundly open to the other” (p. 46). Attempting to make marketing into an adjunct of something like Pearce and Pearce’s (2004) “coordinated management of meaning” (p. 40) inspired Public Dialogue Consortium seems like a fundamental category error. Marketing, as both practice and discipline, is not suited in any way to a role as a public dialogue facilitator. Of course, it can be used to influence public discourse, and it can engage in public ‘dialogue’, but how can we envisage it as a ‘neutral’ platform for the advancement of mutual understanding? Surely, other practices, disciplines, and services are more credentialed to carry out such tasks? Is this, then, simply one more example of marketing’s omnivorous nature? Are the service and relationship perspectives evidence of marketing scholars trying to slowly take over management of the public sphere as well as the commercial sphere under the guise of promoting reasonable, balanced, co-creating dialogue? This pattern, that we have already remarked upon when discussing the debates around the scope of marketing in Chapter 3, is just as much a part of the service and relationship perspectives as it has been of Kotlerian marketing management. Service-Dominant logic, for example, has been slowly extending itself since Vargo and Lusch’s (2004) foundational article and most recently has been positioned as a logic “of human exchange systems that includes the economy and society and transcends academic disciplines” (Lusch and Vargo, 2014, p. 102). The logic’s emphasis has moved outwards to social institutions in general, rather than simply firms (Vargo and Lusch, 2015). In an even more impressive example of how a scholarly perspective centred around symmetrical dialogue, co-creation, and transparency turns into a bid for relevance across the entire public sphere, Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s (2004) explication of their DART model finishes with a description of how their perspective “may ultimately portend the emergence of a truly democratic global society in which human rights, needs, and values are predominant—not the demands of institutions” (p. 238). The marketing strategies behind Build-A-Bear Workshop and Lego Mindstorms, then, appear to be extensible across the whole of society, offering a more effective instantiation of democracy than any so far offered by the woefully short-sighted institutions of politics and ideology.

Such scholarship seeks to (rather ironically) persuade firms to surrender control and their reliance upon the “traditional” tools of persuasion and manipulation. Yet, as I have also argued elsewhere (Miles, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017) such scholarship has a tendency to both misapprehend the extent to which it is enmired in existing control paradigms and also overstate the possibility (and, perhaps, desirability) of power-symmetrical marketing relationships. Marketers, after all, fundamentally manage marketing co-creation—if they create the co-creation space, then they inevitably set the terms and boundaries of dialogue, and if they join an existing stakeholder space then the financial power and communication skills that they bring to the forum inevitably mutate and overbalance it.

However, what if we were to see the whole of the market as a rhetorical space? Firms, suppliers, distributors, retailers, customers, media—everyone is involved in persuasion and self-persuasion attempts. If we begin to accept that human discourse is filled with persuasion and that the market environment is a particularly energetic nexus of persuasion then perhaps we can understand the marketing enterprise for what it is. Yet, as scholars such as Williams (1980), Williamson (2002), and Jhally (1989, 1990) prove, it is hardly just the preserve of progressive marketing scholars to pejoratively characterise ‘traditional’ marketing work as the magico-rhetorical manipulation of unwitting dupes. Furthermore, those marketing scholars oriented towards explorations of consumer culture are loath to engage positively with the magical ‘control’ aspects of marketing practice, even while celebrating the use of similar perspectives by consumers themselves. Such attitudes are also mirrored in much of the rhetoric scholarship of the twentieth century which, as we saw in earlier chapters, is intent on constructing the study of rhetoric as an antidote to the irrational in public discourse (and as such has carefully avoided investigating rhetoric’s central place in the development and practice of marketing).

In the rest of this chapter, I will demonstrate how Sophistic rhetoric, or at least a re-constructed version of it, can provide us with a way of negotiating the place of control in the market place in way that does not flatly demonise persuasion, asymmetrical stakeholder relationships, and magical thinking, and also provides a strong platform from which to think about the evolution of the marketing enterprise. The following discussion naturally builds upon the work done in Chapters 4 and 5 outlining the similarities between marketing and the Sophistic tradition. I will begin with an explication of what the place of agōn, competition or struggle, in Sophistic performance can tell us about the function of marketing.

Marketing and the Sophistic Agōn

Competition was a crucial feature of Sophistic approaches to logos. Hawhee’s (2004) exploration of the underlying relationship between athletics and rhetoric in ancient Greece begins with a remarkable discussion of early rhetoric’s “agonism” (p. 25). She first notes that struggle, or strife, was an “idea that fascinated and drove the ancients”, particularly the idea that struggle can be a positive, creative thing. Hesiod, she notes, speaks of two types of strife, destructive and productive, antagonism and agonism, and it is the latter which is the source of movement in the world. In the Greece of the Sophists, the agon of physical competition was an “occasion for the demonstration and hence production of virtue” (p. 27). Yet, we must not forget that while festivals of physical struggle held the constant attention of the Greeks, such events also included struggles of rhetoric. Indeed, Gorgias himself was famous for his declamations at such festivals, including the Olympics. In ancient Greece, competition was considered to be the most effective way of achieving and demonstrating virtue in sport, music, poetry, and the discursive art of rhetoric. As Hawhee (2004) explains, the preparation for, and participation in, competition embodied a “questing” ideal, a commitment to repetitive ‘trying’ after virtue in one’s field through struggle and competition with others. While final victory was an important element of such festivals and the training for them, of far more importance was the generative nature of repetitive struggle itself, for it is in the struggle that virtue comes into being, not the victory. The Sophist approach to discourse was always agonistic. One of the clearest indications of this is the way in which metaphors drawn from combat sports like wrestling and boxing litter the descriptions of Sophistic debate by people like Plato as well as by Sophists themselves (Hawhee, 2004). Additionally, a Sophistic debate was a lively, interactive experience, where the two speakers sought to position each other and trick/trip each other up in a manner directly analogous to a wrestling match and where the audience would be just as vocal in their expressions of sentiment. This is a very different form of communication situation than that currently characterised as ‘traditional marketing communication’ by relationship and service perspective scholars, but it demonstrates a form of discourse which can be about persuasion, manipulation, and the irrational but which nevertheless can also be highly interactive and involving of many stakeholders.

How far can the concept of Sophistic agonism help us in a consideration of the rhetorical nature of marketing work? In abstract, one would have thought that a competitive environment is a natural one for marketing. Isn’t marketing about finding strategies and tactics to help a firm succeed in a competitive environment? Branding, after all, is a response to cluttered competition spaces where it becomes important to be able to succinctly make a promise about a “unique and welcomed experience” (de Chernatony, 2009, p. 104). Most marketing strategies in the modern toolbox can be seen as responses to competitive landscapes. The service and relationship perspectives are themselves strategies designed to give a firm a competitive advantage (while cloaking themselves in the rhetoric of familial love and reciprocation). Even when the strategic response to competition is to search for a momentarily competition-free space (as in Ries and Trout’s [2001] creneau) or a less competitive industry (as in applications of Porter’s [1979] five forces) this is done with a view to being a struggling player in an overall competitive environment. Such strategies are akin to highly defensive wrestling positions, as we can quite appreciate from Porter’s own language when concluding that “the key to growth—even survival—is to stake out a position that is less vulnerable to attack from head-to-head opponents” (p. 145). When going head-to-head doesn’t make sense, then choose another line of attack, search for another point of competitive advantage, find a point of leverage or the best place to pivot—how can we ever pretend that marketing is not fundamentally agonistic? To adapt Porter’s (1979) phrasing, competitive forces shape marketing in the same way that competition shapes Sophist rhetoric.

However, the exact way in which marketing fits into the competitive landscape is in need of some careful consideration. A Sophistic disputation took place between two speakers and in front of an audience. The audience, ultimately, judges the primacy of a Sophist even if there is a formal judge. The panhellenic festivals were places where rhetors would perform in contest in order to attract disciples (Tell, 2011). The audience is thus a group of consumers, or prospects, and the contest is a way of directing attention towards the speaker who has the most powerful grasp of logos. Sophist speakers could have an effect on such consumers that is entirely redolent of modern cult brands—Protagoras and Empedocles, for example, would have thousands of people meeting them at the entrance to a festival and exerted what Tell (2011, p. 120) calls an “Orphic attraction” on their audiences. In marketing terms, then, the rhetorical contest is a display of the competing Sophists’ ability to attract and hold the attention of their consumers, the more effectively their words enchant, then the more customers they are likely to have (and the more their reputation will grow). The two competitors are trying to differentiate themselves before the eyes of the consumer. Another important part of the Sophist’s presence at such festivals was that the audience also had the opportunity to engage the speakers directly when they made themselves available to answer any question that was posed to them. Here, the valuable Sophist technique of kairos, or improvisation, is able to be tested and displayed and it highlights once more the manner in which interactive, dialogical communication can be framed within a persuasive, competitive, marketing environment. Marketers should see interacting with customers as a persuasive mode—every dialogue touchpoint is an opportunity to persuade a prospect or existing customer of the firm’s greater fitness to their purpose, of the fact that they offer a more attractive and desirable value proposition than the competition.

So, thinking about competitive Sophistic debate allows us to think about marketing’s persuasive nature. Sophists at the games and festivals sought to differentiate themselves, to manage the audience’s regard, through public competition—when they debated with their competitor their words were ostensibly directed at a fellow rhetor but were in fact composed (or improvised) for the consumption of the judges and the audience. In marketing, we rarely engage in such direct, ‘head-to-head’ (to use Porter’s designation) communication—indeed, the ability to address market rivals by name is usually highly regulated—however, we are always communicating within a competitive situation, with one eye on the performance of our rivals, and this has a powerful effect upon the form and content of our discourse with consumers. So, while a Christmas TV campaign for a retailer such as John Lewis might look like a direct address to a consumer audience, it is also very much a piece of communication in Sophistic contest with the brand’s rivals. Indeed, not just marketing communication performances, but all marketing strategy decisions are born out of contest and played out in front of (for the benefit of) consumers and other stakeholders targeted for influence. So, while contesting Sophists argued with each other, it was always the audience who were spellbound, enchanted, or charmed (Tell, 2011).

Rhetoric, persuasion, logos, magic—these are not things done to the audience. They are done with the audience, made from the audience. The enchantment that Protagoras and Empedocles could weave was something that the audience travelled many miles to experience. Their understanding of what makes a good argument, what form of words should make them feel in a particular way, what symbols they value the most deeply is just as important as the Sophists’ understanding of these things about the audience. It also helps to make the audience into more self-aware users of logos—it demonstrates the many forms of rhetorical argumentation and the varieties of persuasive style.

We might baulk at describing marketing in such a way. ‘Yes,’ we might say, ‘the words of greats like Empedocles and Gorgias, they can be admirable demonstrations of persuasion, argumentation and kairos, but marketing is just vulgar and manipulative and is simply crafted for commercial purposes’. And said this we have. Even marketing scholars, as we have seen, have largely been loath to stand up for the value of marketing’s argumentation and persuasion—so much so now that we are trying to ‘make it over’ into some impossibly misguided model of civic discourse (rather like a curious ‘my boyfriend does my makeup’ video on YouTube). But marketers are not Aristotelians, not even Isocratians; they are Sophists in the highly competitive market for attention. We should be celebrating the profession’s facility with logos, researching and evolving it, rather than hiding it behind scientism and appeals to rationality.

Wholeheartedly adopting Sophistic agonism into marketing scholarship does not necessarily mean that we have to stop talking about relationships, per se. However, rather than the central metaphors of marriages and family that tend to dominate current perspectives (O’Malley et al., 2008), we should explore relationship frames that are generated by situations of performance, contest, and competition far more fully. Understanding firms as performers in contests of rhetorical argumentation would mean that audience members are automatically empowered as the final arbiters of value and virtue. A performance succeeds as far as it convinces the audience, moves them, changes their attitude, and resonates with them—in other words, as far as it makes the performer and object of regard. And audience members are always potential performers themselves—the persuasion and attention manipulation that they employ in their own lives in so many different ways are terms of reference for their understanding and evaluation of the performance of brands.

The job of marketing is to provide a strategic and tactical service to win stakeholder regard in a competitive environment and, while the nature and extent of that competition might change, the struggle of competition is an essential driver for marketing.

Sophistic Relativism and Marketing Service

The agonistic nature of Sophism also illustrates one of the most disturbing characteristics of rhetoric for both the general public and philosophers of the rational and systematic—relativism. As implied in the story of great Sophist speakers opening themselves up to questions on any topic, Sophists drew great pride from their training’s ability to allow them to discourse on any subject without being an expert. We have already seen in Chapter 5 how Gorgias delighted in being able to persuade patients of his doctor friends to undergo treatments that their actual doctors had not been able to convince them the worth of. This sort of practice is, of course, embodied in the dissoi logoi which were used as training aids for Sophists and which required the student to rehearse arguments for and against the same statement. Such Sophist techniques underline a view of truth that is relative—an argument can always find a truth. If the speaker has to convince an audience that the city should go to war, then the speaker should be able to find an argument to support such a proposition, and if they are required to promote the opposite then they should be able to do that as well. Finding appropriate arguments and working out how to best convince an audience are the valuable skills that Sophists ‘sold’ in their teaching and demonstrated in their public disputations. The marketer, too, should be able to pick up a brand, a product, a client and construct a convincing ‘argument’ for how to increase stakeholder regard. And should a rival brand, product, or client offer to pay them more or provide them with a more attractive future, then the marketer should be able to do exactly the same thing for them. A marketing agency can work for many different clients across many different industries as well as from the public sector, and it is expected that they will be able to produce creative, effective solutions for them all. The spirit of the dissoi logoi is absolutely embedded in marketing work. Marketing helps a firm to find its own truth, its value proposition—and that truth is generated in the light of the competitive environment within which the firm exists, and so is its essential point of differentiation in the contest for regard.

The scientification of marketing scholarship has worked against an understanding of the value proposition in these relativistic terms. Marketing science attempts to use empirical research using aggregated data that is statistically analysed in order to find patterns (in consumer behaviour, firm growth, market entry success, etc.)—and these patterns then become truths of the market that can be applied to those making related decisions in the future. The promise of marketing science is the promise of science—concrete, provable, reproducible truths that can be relied upon. Yet, if we see marketing as a Sophistic enterprise, such a chasing after scientific truth makes little sense. The truth depends upon the firm you work for, their stakeholders, their competitors, a myriad of shifting variables—how can there be universal truths in such rhetorical situations? Perhaps, indeed, the move towards a positioning of the firm around the value proposition in service perspectives such as S-D logic is an unconscious recognition of the rhetorical nature of the marketing endeavour?

An interesting question that arises from a consideration of the relationship marketing paradigm in this context is to what extent is the “part-time marketer” (Gummesson, 2002) involved in Sophistic practice? Gummesson (2002) defines full-time marketers (FTMs) as “those who are hired for working with marketing and sales tasks” and part-time marketers (PTMs) as “all others in the company and those in its environment that influence the company’s marketing” (p. 77). He makes the sensible point that it is “legitimate and imperative for everyone [in the firm] to influence customer relationships” (p. 78)—indeed, if there are employees “who do not influence the relationship to customers full-time or part-time, directly or indirectly”, then they are “redundant” (p. 82). Consequently, it makes perfect sense for any internal PTMs to be practiced in the kairotic, agonistic art of marketing rhetoric, to be mindful of the contest in which their firm is continually engaged and to be aware of their role in manipulating the regard of external stakeholders. Gummesson (2008) notes that those external stakeholders can also function as PTMs, and he argues that customers are the “most important marketers” (p. 80) outside the firm. I think that an understanding of marketing as a rhetorical practice would support Gummesson’s views here. Rhetoric is not something just done by a single speaker getting up in front of an audience. The audience itself is involved in creating any rhetorical situation and in many instances there might well be no simple audience but instead a group of contending rhetors who function in shifting ways as rhetor and audience, judge and rival. Scholarship of consumer culture has demonstrated definitively that the consumer should be considered as a rhetor, too. Though that scholarship might well have tended to avoid the problem of how to understand the ways that consumer rhetors and marketer rhetors engage with each other, it has been vital in bringing to marketing’s attention the fact that consumers are not the passive propaganda receivers of early communication theory myth. While the marketing department or marketing agency might be the site of full-time, professional rhetorical work, that does not mean that marketing rhetoric work is not continually carried out by everyone else. The marketing profession represents a powerful, systematised nexus of logos workers, but consumers, suppliers, and distributors (to name just three stakeholders) are also users of logos and will engage in rhetorical argumentation to manage regard to greater or lesser degrees. I would argue that a re-orientation of marketing around a recognition of its rhetorical nature would actually enable a far more powerful awareness of the power of logos across stakeholders and publics. This would also enable the efficient identification and training of PTMs by the marketing department in rhetorical skills which would be of benefit to the firm but also the employee (in terms of transferrable, empowering knowledge and experience).

A marketing practice conscious of its roots in Sophistic relativism might attract accusations of ambiguity, deception, and untrustworthiness—rather like the accusations that have accompanied marketing since it began. But an explicit, conscious owning of those roots would do a lot to contextualise the reasons for such mistrust. Ambiguity and deception are realities of many forms of human discourse and they can have positive, generative meanings. As Jarratt (1998) explains, when discussing Gorgias’ theory of logos, “deception is a function of any discourse event”, and the audience is always complicit, co-creating that deception—“their mental participation and, eventually, their assent is required for any discourse to have the force of knowledge” (p. 56). She notes that the early Sophists existed at a time when there were no hard boundaries between genres of discourse—poetry, tragedy, political declamation, religious ritual, magical charm, and competitive eristics were all one and the same. While we have delighted in building the existence of genres, sub-genres and micro-genres into our way of understanding human expression, we have done so at the cost of a great deal of flexibility in our thinking about the power of language and imagery.

Sophism sees relativism, ambiguity, and deception in a positive light. They make of discourse something that we should all be highly engaged with, moment-to-moment. Sophistic rhetoric is an argument for constant, mindful alertness—precisely because we are the measure of all things, we create our identities but also our realities through logos (and the imagery) we employ. If we are fooled, it is because we have allowed ourselves to be fooled—we have succumbed to opinion, to poetry, to magic, to an argument that feels right because it touches just the right emotions and prejudices in me. And this is the case not just for marketing arguments but for every argument we are exposed to. A marketing which embraces its Sophistic nature demands far more from its practitioners but also from its audiences—it holds them accountable for what they choose to submit to, what truths they choose to co-create. Consequently, it also reifies the agonistic nature of both marketing and non-marketing discourse. A Sophistic marketing understands every ‘touchpoint’ as an instance of contest, an opportunity to argue for the fitness of a value proposition—but in doing so it also promotes every touchpoint as an occasion for others to dispute, and for audiences to choose to succumb or not. Naturally, none of this denies the existence of scientific truth nor seeks to scorn the scientific project. However, it does rest upon the assumption that, for much of the time in our discourse as humans, we are not concerned with arriving at ‘scientific truth’ or the scientific process. Instead, we are concerned with promoting the ‘truth’ of our businesses, our relationships, our histories, our narratives, our selves. Sophistic marketing would see all of these as contested sites that require rhetorical argumentation to continually establish.

It is, at this point, worth pointing out that anyone who worries that a Sophistic marketing would open the floodgates of irrational public discourse simply needs to open their eyes and take a look around at what passes for public discourse in their society. The pretence that civic discourse, let alone commercial discourse, should be based upon logic, rationality, and measured dialogue is palpably failing us. I would argue that our loss of intellectual involvement with rhetoric as a practice, as something that we should all be involved in from an early age, has resulted in the currently impoverished state of civic discourse. A marketing which embraces the agonistic arena of Sophist rhetoric has the potential to draw our attention towards, and increase our regard for, the power of logos, enabling us not just to criticise its use in others (only ever half of the story) but also to invoke that power ourselves.

Magico-Rhetorical Relationships in Marketing

An understanding of marketing that sees it as an instantiation of Sophist practices of logos would accrue little advantage from ignoring the development of rhetorical scholarship from Socrates onwards. As we have seen, however, much of this development is positioned in opposition to Sophistic eristic practices and perspectives. The downgrading of style, the overemphasis of logos proofs at the expense of intellectual engagement with ethos and pathos, and the periodic merging of dialectic with rhetoric are all aspects of this oppositional historical development. As the chapters on the relationship between marketing, rhetoric, and magic suggest, though, there is a sense in which Sophistic approaches can be seen to have survived in our fascination with the magical and the performative power of words. Magic is continually referenced in advertising, both explicitly and figuratively, and as the consumer culture literature demonstrates, it also suffuses consumer relationships with products and services as well as their self-construction projects. How far can general marketing scholarship accept magic, though? Despite Brown’s (2009) call for a re-casting of marketing as a branch of applied magic, such a position is intrinsically anathema to the majority of scholars who would identify as working within the discipline of ‘marketing science’. One also wonders just how supportive those scholars of consumer culture who have helped to identify magical thinking in consumers would be of a marketing practice which chose to see itself as adapting to consumer magical thinking and consciously using it in their persuasive interaction with consumers? Should we co-create magical thinking? Or should we be more ‘responsible’? One would assume that scholars who self-identify as rationalists and ‘scientists’ would baulk at such suggestions, even though consumer research might suggest that this is a powerful factor in the consumption experience.

A Sophistic understanding, a Gorgian perspective, might be helpful here. The Sophistic style is not all resonant sound, hypnotic patternings, and vivid metaphor. As a cursory study of Gorgias’ Encomium shows, subtle, clever argument that engages the audience within their social, political, and religious contexts is also a vital part of how a Sophist practices the art of logos. The Encomium is described by Jarratt (1998) as a “performance piece” in which Gorgias “balances the disturbing recognition of linguistic indeterminacy with the familiarity of myth, both occurring within a clearly structured argument” (p. 57). The lesson here for us is that we should not turn away from magic, from the performative aspect of logos—we need to see it as coexistent with structure, rationality, cleverness, even the ‘scientific’.

Consider the, by now, quite established marketing scholarship on the use of figurative language in persuasive communications that we explored in Chapter 2. How have we integrated the insights generated by this research into wider marketing scholarship? The answer is that we have not. Works written by marketing practitioners for other marketing practitioners, however, are quite a different matter. There is a long history of practical texts written by seasoned copywriters, for example, that speak enthusiastically about the importance of metaphors, language patternings, and other figurations in order to affect consumers viscerally as well as intellectually (some examples close to my desk would include Horberry and Lingwood, 2014; Shaw, 2015; Maslen, 2015; Sullivan, 2008). While some of these authors might have little familiarity with the rhetorical tradition and, indeed, might well transmit their wisdom under the mantle of ‘what psychology can teach us about language’, the truth is that much of their advice comes straight out of Sophist and Aristotelian rhetorical play-books. Integrating the rational and the irrational, the systematic with the rhapsodic, is not a problem that marketing practitioners have. Marketing scholarship, however, is still very far from having the tools or mindset to facilitate such a rapprochement. Yet our attention, our regard is affected by the irrational as well as the rational, the magical as well as the scientific or bureaucratic. We can make marketing decisions based upon magical thinking because, as we have seen, consumption is often based upon magical thinking. As scholars, we are also consumers/audiences—and we are as much influenced by magical thinking in our scholarly judgements and decisions as any other consumer might be. Integrating into marketing scholarship and education a nuanced understanding of the power of magico-rhetorical performative language and imagery, as well as the surreal logic of magical thinking, allows the discipline to function more effectively, and in far more subtle ways.

Kairos and Marketing Strategy

Perhaps one of the areas where Sophistic approaches to the control of attention and regard can have the most immediate effect in terms of aiding marketing practice is in the area of kairos. As Cassin (2014) states, improvisation is a “key element which sums up an entire series of features of sophistic logos” (p. 88). Kairos represents an enthusiasm for thinking on one’s feet, judging the immediate context, the state of the audience, the resources at hand, to create a powerful argumentative line through the rhetorical encounter. It also, at a deeper level, conveys the truth that an argument is never finished, never completed, for “every argument turns into its own contrary as soon as it is enunciated because it has been enunciated” (p. 89). The Sophistic rhetor only ever pauses, never stops (in their persuasion, but also in their consideration of the audience, context, resources, etc.). Marketing also operates within this improvisatory dynamic, though there are also elements within marketing practice and education which work towards an agglutinating, or solidifying, of this flux due to the urge to institutionalise and bureaucratise marketing work. So, we have the tradition of the marketing plan (Cohen, 2006; McDonald, 2017; Kotler and Keller, 2015, etc.) which seeks to pull together all of the contextual information, objectives, tools, and financial and resource considerations in order to set out a logical, organised schema for any specific marketing campaign. The traditional divisions of the plan such as situational analysis, objectives, strategic decisions, tactical decisions, and measurement instruments make the marketing process highly structured and bureaucratic—a teachable, repeatable mechanism for the development of proficient marketing strategies. Rhetoric, of course, has its own equivalent planning tradition as we saw when reviewing the Classical legacy of Cicero and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. These structures are born from the Aristotelian systematisation of rhetorical practice and become more and more detailed over the centuries. Just like the marketing plan they solidify rhetorical practice to make it easy to teach, easy to reproduce, and easy to execute. A practiced speaker will not have to sit down and sweat over the choices of the five canons and the six parts of arrangement every time they need to persuade someone. The structure is designed to be internalised through practice so that it becomes something that can act as a scaffold for creativity and a true, kairotic reaction to the resources of the moment. The danger is, though, that rhetorical planning comes to dominate over the improvisatory. Frameworks become overly relied upon, transforming into ever more complex and inflexible structures that drain persuasive communication of creativity and a keen awareness of the flux in any situation. Improvisation, then, becomes the foe of the planning mind, a threat to the bureaucratic instinct and, accordingly, it becomes constructed oppositionally as something to be expelled from the profession/discipline or dismissed as unteachable and unreliable.

A Sophistic marketing needs to re-assert improvisation as an essential part of the practice, and scholars aiming to support such a marketing must make concerted efforts to research, understand, and teach the manner in which kairos sits at the heart of Sophistic practice. Rhetorical improvisation is a real-time, resource-based, customer-focused practice. It embodies all of the traits that we expect of marketing but disengages it (by necessity) from the bureaucratic planning process. There are some similarities here to what has been dubbed “real-time marketing” (McKenna, 1995, 1997; Oliver et al., 1998), which is born from an appreciation of the general move towards mass customization and interactive communication technologies. Real-time marketing emphasises “creativity and flexibility” (Oliver et al., 1998 p. 36) and attempts to base the modern marketing process in a dialogue orientation (McKenna, 1995, 1997) that connects it intellectually to larger relationship and service perspectives. However, while the scholarly work on real-time marketing does concern itself with the necessity to react quickly and individually to rapid changes in customer requirements, it contains no engagement with the concept of improvisation that any form of dialogue-based relationship must contain. Instead, it falls to the marketing science urge to systematise, to bureaucratise the real-time. Technology is seen as a substitute for human improvisation rather than as an aid to its performance. If improvisation was acknowledged by, welcomed into, marketing as a desirable, teachable, essential skill, how much more effective and ‘realistic’ any dialogue/relationship orientation would be! Yet, there is a distinct sense in which improvisation might represent the thin end of the Sophist wedge. How could a marketing discipline obsessed with the structures of scientification admit improvisation into its heart? Even on one of the very few occasions that a marketing scholar has enthusiastically addressed the importance of improvisation (Holbrook, 2003), it has been done so within the rhetorically ‘safe’ scientific frame of an exploration of how chaos theory and the study of complex adaptive systems can have implications for marketing thought (though one charmingly leavened by Holbrook’s characteristic humanistic valorisation of jazz). The rhetorical tradition, however, considers improvisation within the framing of persuasive address, disputation, and dialogue—just the sort of framing that marketing requires. The value of this tradition, particularly with respect to the construction of pedagogical modalities that could be effective in giving full-time and part-time marketers the abilities to function more effectively in stakeholder relationships and encounters can not be overstated. However, it is contained most firmly within a Humanities tradition of scholarship and enquiry and, like all other aspects of Sophistic marketing, it requires an internal re-ordering of the discipline towards a balanced understanding of how the Humanities and the Sciences can work with and support each other.

Finally, the importance of practiced, nuanced, and informed improvisa-tory approaches to marketing communication in an era of social media should not need to be pointed out. Contextual opportunities need to be seized, fleeting resources need to be effectively harnessed, and the agonistic challenge of real-time dialogue with a variety of stakeholders needs to be entered into professionally and a full understanding of its importance in generating and directing regard.

Marketing and Liminality

As argued earlier in this book, the liminal, middle position of marketing is something that it shares with rhetoric, particularly the Sophistic tradition. It is in the nature of this position to engender fear, suspicion, and hostility in others while at the same time attracting, fascinating and alluring. Indeed, the former is in many ways simply a function of the latter. The middle, intermediary position is so often a sacred one—intercessors, prophets, sha-mans, priests, and, of course, magicians, all stand in between the everyday world and the numinous, the dreamlike, the mysterious. The marketer is in between stakeholders and the firm, but also stands at the borders of rational and irrational, the customer’s conscious deliberation and their unconscious desires, between the past of a brand and its future. As a result, it is often treated with scepticism, wariness, or disdain—by clients, the C-suite, non-marketing scholars and ‘thinkers’, journalists, and consumers. The accusations of magic and witchcraft made by Williams (2002) and Jhally (1989), for example, are reactions to their perceptions of marketing’s intermediary services for capitalism that are perceived to construct a veil between the reality of production and the consumer. Yet neither marketing scholarship nor marketing practice have truly faced up to the consequences of marketing’s liminal, middle position. And all the while the relevance of marketing scholarship to practice appears to be decreasing (AMA Task Force, 1988; McCole, 2004; Nyilasy and Reid, 2007; Reibstein et al., 2009; Lee and Greenley, 2010; Lehmann et al., 2011) and the reputation of marketing in practice seems to be waning (Hill et al., 2007; Nath and Mahajan, 2008; Verhoef and Leeflang, 2009; Clark et al., 2013; Park et al., 2012). Increasing the scientific rigour of marketing scholarship has not had any effect on this state of affairs, as cogently argued by Brown (2009). It is time for marketing to recognise its liminality—and to work with it. Instead of retreating further into the undergrowth of scientific discourse, marketing scholarship needs to provide marketing practice with the intellectual support that it deserves and this support is to be found in the traditions of persuasive communication and the direction of regard that have been developing for thousands of years. Marketing scholarship can do nothing but benefit from a resolve to celebrate and then strengthen the practice’s position as an intermediary between realms. If we stop trying on lab coats perhaps clients, managers, and stakeholders will begin to recognise us for what we are—researchers and practitioners in the direction of regard. And perhaps then we can all recognise just how important it is for all of us to be able to engage in this contested realm.

In modern scholarship, as has been the case at many points in its development, the study of rhetoric is primarily focused upon its place in political discourse. The marketplace is ignored or marginalised as an arena for important rhetorical encounters. Perhaps much of the reason behind this is because politics has a longstanding tradition of being valorised intellectually within Western academic discourse, whereas the market is seen as an infecting, liminal space that threatens virtue, honour, and decency. And so the realm in which we spend most of our time immersed (even while we are ‘doing politics’), the ever-flowing, ever-seeping sea of the agora, is blindly relegated to footnotes and marginalia. If marketing scholarship can begin to understand marketing’s place at the end of a long and distinguished rhetorical tradition, perhaps rhetorical scholars will begin to engage reciprocally with marketing.

A Final Definition of a (Sophistic) Marketing

I now offer a slightly re-worded and glossed definition of what I see as a (Sophistic) marketing, a new understanding of what marketing does and should be doing and therefore what the object of marketing scholarship should be.